So eBay has a new logo design from Lippincott, which has raised the ire of designer and non-designer folks alike. Is the problem that it’s boring or that there’s too much tension in that super tight kerning?
The always astute Armin Vit hates it.
Of all the potential logos that could be done for eBay this is the absolute most boring and risk-averse logo that could have been both presented and selected. There is a lot of “could”s here and that’s what I find the most disappointing with this redesign: there was an opportunity to create a logo as memorable — ideally for better reasons — as the old one. Instead we got a typeface out of the box with super tight tracking and kerning. Somebody call the Fun Police, they are all fired because we clearly don’t need them anymore.
The comments on Mashable mostly focus on how the new logo is a reflection of how bad eBay has become as a company over the years, but the most design-centric comment agrees with the notion that this was a major missed opportunity.
Perhaps it’s bland enough to last another 17 years but my feeling is that the original logo had been around just about long enough to have built up status, even the higgledy piggledy, overlapped letters seem like they could have been thrown a life-raft and put to excellent use. Ultimately it feels like it speaks to mediocrity—which is probably fine, and as mentioned before there seems to be no real expansion into a deeper brand experience, which for me is a lost opportunity; I wonder if this just the nature of companies with engineers and tech people at their very core, there seems to be an overwhelmingly flawed attitude amongst tech folk that if the product (the website) is good enough, the brand experience is superfluous fluff.
The commenters on Logo Design Love seriously hate it.
I think anyone who says this new ebay Logo is exciting, colorful or ground breaking is talking rubbish or works at ebay. This plasticky one dimensional logo looks jaded and tired and cheap. Ebays stocks and shares aren’t going to rise on the strength of this tacky effort.
And pop-culture site Buzzfeed dedicated a post to bad kerning but produced an interesting alternative in the comments.
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